The Tick Hill Project is a proposed gold recovery development located at the historical Tick Hill Gold Mine, about 120km south-east of Mount Isa.

The project focuses on reprocessing tailings material left from the original Tick Hill mining operation, which produced gold between 1991 and 1995 and was regarded as one of Australia’s highest-grade gold mines.

During the original mining period, ore was processed through a conventional crushing, milling and carbon-in-leach (CIL) plant, with the remaining finely ground material deposited into two tailings paddocks within a purpose-built tailings dam.

Exploration and drilling programs have since identified a JORC-compliant resource of around 630,000t of tailings grading approximately 1.08g/t gold, containing roughly 22,000 ounces of gold that could potentially be recovered through modern processing techniques.

The project concept involves excavating or hydraulically reclaiming the historic tailings and reprocessing them through a gold recovery circuit, potentially using nearby processing facilities.

Re-treatment of tailings is considered relatively low risk compared with conventional mining because the material has already been crushed and ground during earlier processing.

The project was recently being pursued by a joint venture including AuKing (ASX:AKN) and Orion Resources.